Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion

Sunday morning ironying

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About this blog

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the
...

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the MetroWest/495 area and spreads from there to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. You'll also find here lots of cross-referencing to columns and editorials in the MetroWest Daily News.

The blog presents an opportunity for readers to comment directly and immediately on pieces that appear on the print pages.

A colleague likes to remind me that I once commented I don’t always know what I am talking about. Aside from the fact that he is ignoring an important ethic with regard to the use of other people’s self deprecating humor, I think he also missed my point, or more aptly, my pondering. (Perhaps I lacked a point… that’s my point.) Sometimes a discussion can and should be about the things we are just considering, not the defense of some preset conception. Not every challenge or question we face has to fit itself along the lines of our long entrenched points of view. Not every utterance has to bespeak an already decided opinion. Not every argument need be a fight to be won, with an opponent to vanquish.
With that as my preface, I’ll remark here on two different points that have struck me and struck me hard as ironies lately in our public popular discourse.
First there’s the case of Sergeant Berdahl coming home. I’ll admit to letting this one get to me a bit. I usually try to champion what I like to call reasonable constructive debate, the notion of civil civic difference being a good thing. I’ve argued that this is what our political system and even our society as a whole is premised upon. And I can well understand the details of the decision to trade Bergdahl for Taliban prisoners as a subject for that very kind of debate —if we could only have it. There has maybe been some of that debate, but also (and often instead) we’ve had the spectacle of this young American soldier’s character put on trial in the media for entertainment’s sake. In these debates over whether he was “worth the cost” in this trade, the ugly irony I can’t help but notice is how much more of the resentment and vitriol is focused upon Bergdahl, the young soldier himself —so much more than there is upon any of the Taliban involved. One could easily chalk this up as another example of Obama Derangement Syndrome and argue that the bile is really for the commander-in-chief who chose to bring this soldier home, but I think even that syndrome is more symptom than diagnosis. There is something in the loathsomeness here —I wonder if our biggest problem isn’t the one we all have with ourselves.
The news snippet I caught the other day had some posturing ignoramus media personality holding forth on Bergdahl’s character defects with the exhibit at hand for consideration a picture of the young man taking ballet lessons. This was pointed to as somehow evidence of the soldiers’s degenerate narcissistic personality affect. I’ll admit this display made me angry. Reports that Sergeant Bergdahl was returning home a little worse for the wear psychologically after five years captivity, coupled with the spectacle of these character trials in the media circus court, even death threats directed at his parents over the political implications of his father’s facial hair —these all left me grappling with a feeling I came to recognize as shame. I never get so angry as when I am angry at myself. I was ashamed, personally embarrassed by the conduct towards this young man and his family. I felt that shame and I felt it so personally because I know I am a part of this culture where we tell ourselves every question deserves an argument. And we come to offer insult instead.
Young Sergeant Bergdahl’s story will always bear the markings of that insult, even as the facts come to be known the way they are supposed to be known, through careful investigation, debriefing of the soldier himself. Those facts won’t get nearly the attention his story as supposed in the argument of the day is getting now. I can’t help but be reminded of the Vietnam experience, the way this country made her soldiers culprits, pariahs, repositories for all the conflicted country’s feeling surrounding a controversial war. Those marks are still there to this day. Where we did it to a whole generation of soldiers after Vietnam maybe we can limit ourselves to one or two like Bergdahl this time around. Maybe we can call that progress.
Oh, yes, and the next irony that struck me, maybe it’s related. I noticed how the controversies surrounding the VA as of late have given rise to certain pundits and deep thinking political minds claiming that, what with Obamacare, we no longer needed a separate VA to address the healthcare needs of those who serve. The irony comes in when you notice these are the same pundits and deep political thinkers who profess to their party faithful that repealing Obamacare is still their number one priority.